1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to client-server computing systems, and more particularly to, a method and system for providing HTML page annotations on the client using AJAX.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet, also commonly referred to as the Web, provides a means for publishing documents (e.g. pages) and providing access to vast amounts of documents already published. A user may access a certain document on the Web and may want to share comments regarding the contents of the document with one or more users. A user, desiring to collaborate with a group of users regarding specific content of the document, has to do so by extracting the contents of the relevant document and sharing the contents with the group of users. This could be accomplished by accessing the document on the Web, scrolling down to the actual location of the specific content to be shared, extracting the specific content into a document along with a link to the webpage and sharing this document with other users through an email. The recipient(s) of the email will have to go to the webpage using the link provided in the document, scroll down to the location of the specific content, read the content and relate the content with the comments provided by the first user in the email. If the recipient needs to respond to the comments back to the first user or share his/her comments with the group of users, the recipient has to follow the steps outlined above and send the email with his/her comments back to other users including the first user. This sort of collaboration becomes cumbersome given the amount of the information available on the Web and length of some of the documents. Also, scrolling through pages of documents trying to locate the content is daunting.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a method and system that will overcome the aforementioned problems by providing a collaborating tool that can provide the user with greater flexibility to create, edit, and share comments about the contents of a document published on the Web, among a group of users.